So, a year out of college I decided to invest the little bit of college funds I had left over into making a movie. After all, that's what I wanted to do with my life.
I wrote the script fairly quickly, got a producer on board, and had my business partner at the time DP it. Honestly, the entire preproduction and production experience was a blur. I think we prepped the movie only two months before locking in the shooting dates. We shot six days a week, for 3 weeks. Most of the crew slept in my parents basement. The perks of being that young and making a film, I guess.
After shooting, we quickly banged out an edit to send to Sundance-- I believe we only had a few weeks to send a rough cut. Of course it fell short (I think mostly due to its rough state). Unsure of what to do next, we had it debut at the Action On Film Festival in Cali in 2010. A great festival, but a big mistake. Once it premiered there, the other top festivals wouldn't accept it, as they want to be a festival to debut a film. So without any distributors knocking on our door, what options were we left with. Well, not too many. I directly contacted at least 40 distribution companies, and always got the same response "we like your movie, but not sure how to market it".
Years passed, and I figured the movie would be shelved forever. That is, until I found out about Amazon Direct Video. It's a service that allows filmmakers to submit their own content, and if accepted, would be hosted on their platform for millions of Prime customers. Suddenly inspired, I revisited my film and cut out 10 minutes of dialogue, re colored, and cleared all the copyright materials.
Creating an Amazon Video Direct account was pretty simple. You set up a bank account, fill out information about your title (cast/ crew), upload artwork and submit. However, they do require it to be captioned. This was something that I had never done before, but figured out how to do myself with a free program called Aegisub.
Once everything was set, I hit the publish button. And waited. And waited more. After 3 or 4 days, I suddenly noticed my film was uploaded to Amazon Prime. Just like that, a film I thought would never be seen again had life. After a week or two it broke into the top500 dramas on Prime.

So that's the experience in a nutshell. Please check out the film if you can and give me feedback. I'm hoping to make another film again.

So, a year out of college I decided to invest the little bit of college funds I had left over into making a movie. After all, that's what I wanted to do with my life.
I wrote the script fairly quickly, got a producer on board, and had my business partner at the time DP it. Honestly, the entire preproduction and production experience was a blur. I think we prepped the movie only two months before locking in the shooting dates. We shot six days a week, for 3 weeks. Most of the crew slept in my parents basement. The perks of being that young and making a film, I guess.
After shooting, we quickly banged out an edit to send to Sundance-- I believe we only had a few weeks to send a rough cut. Of course it fell short (I think mostly due to its rough state). Unsure of what to do next, we had it debut at the Action On Film Festival in Cali in 2010. A great festival, but a big mistake. Once it premiered there, the other top festivals wouldn't accept it, as they want to be a festival to debut a film. So without any distributors knocking on our door, what options were we left with. Well, not too many. I directly contacted at least 40 distribution companies, and always got the same response "we like your movie, but not sure how to market it".
Years passed, and I figured the movie would be shelved forever. That is, until I found out about Amazon Direct Video. It's a service that allows filmmakers to submit their own content, and if accepted, would be hosted on their platform for millions of Prime customers. Suddenly inspired, I revisited my film and cut out 10 minutes of dialogue, re colored, and cleared all the copyright materials.
Creating an Amazon Video Direct account was pretty simple. You set up a bank account, fill out information about your title (cast/ crew), upload artwork and submit. However, they do require it to be captioned. This was something that I had never done before, but figured out how to do myself with a free program called Aegisub.
Once everything was set, I hit the publish button. And waited. And waited more. After 3 or 4 days, I suddenly noticed my film was uploaded to Amazon Prime. Just like that, a film I thought would never be seen again had life. After a week or two it broke into the top500 dramas on Prime.

So that's the experience in a nutshell. Please check out the film if you can and give me feedback. I'm hoping to make another film again.

That's awesome dude. Could you tell me what was your budget and what camera you shot it with?